I do not say altar as a matter of phraseology, nor to do homage to the religious ceremony of marriage, but because I am deeply convinced that if there be nothing beyond the union of bodies or association of capital marriage is a sacrilege. The troth of two should always be plighted on an altar, whether it be that of Christ or of some ideal, of Moses or Mahomet, of poetry or religion. Old people only marry once, either to win legitimacy for an old contraband love, or to give a legal status to the children. They are marriages of reparation, corrections of proof-sheets set aside for many years and forgotten. They merit our approbation and belong to those good actions of which Christ speaks, which, if done at the last hour, make death less hard and allow us to die at peace and at rest with the faith, which illuminates our souls and prepares us to start in the train that bears us to eternal silence, or to the golden gates of the Christian paradise. In the marriage of two old people who love each other, love is no intoxicating flower, but a friendship slightly gilded by sexual sympathy, which endures longer than the reproductive function even as it precedes it. ⁂ _A middle-aged man and a young woman_: If theory, hygiene, logical concords, and compacts proclaim the truth—which has all the force of a dogma—that an old man ought not to marry a young woman, daily practice shows us that all these combinations are possible: 40 ♀ + 20 ♂ 50 ♀ + 18 ♂ 60 ♀ + 30 ♂ 60 ♀ + 15 ♂ 70 ♀ + 30 ♂ 70 ♀ + 20 ♂ 80 ♀ + 40 ♂ 80 ♀ + 30 ♂ 80 ♀ + 15 or 18 ♂ All formulæ, cold and precise as the numbers that make them up, but full of a terrible crescendo of precipices and cataclysms! They arouse before us the phantom of a perfect pandemonium, and show us the horrors of a hell more dreadful than that of Dante. How many tears, how much blood, bathe the path which divides those figures! What deep and hidden hatred, how much revenge premeditated during the night and put into practice in the clear light of day; how many deceptions planned with the cruelty of art; what repentance, crimes, intrigues, bitterness of soul; how many tortures and struggles are written between those silent and lifeless figures? Yet, still, you will find the rarest, most complete, and perfect happiness lying close to this hell, like an oasis in the midst of a desert. For example, there are marriages of which the formula is 60 + 30, and even 50 + 18, that are real Edens of delight, where neither the most lovely and fragrant flowers of spring-time, nor the sweet tendernesses of voluptuousness, illimitable prospects, painless sighs, conversation without words, nor all indescribable delights, are wanting; and where you have also the charm that belongs to difficulty, and all the fascination which surrounds things sacred.